The Whiplash of Holy Week

Holy Week is the “Week of Whiplash.” The highs in the Story of Palm Sunday are followed all too quickly by the shouts from the crowd calling for His death. Then He slow-walks the next days: from the Garden to the Courtyard to the Praetorium to the Streets to the Calvary Hill to the Cross to the End to the Tomb to the Burial, and then into silence…

We know all of that…and yet we know that this Sunday is a celebration of hope and promise; the proclamation and display of the evidence of His victory that has been won. So here are some “Resurrection Thoughts” to guide your prayers and preparation. Indeed, in the midst of the Story of death and all death…we have this Hope.

Thinking about the Resurrection

“Why did Christianity arise, and why did it take the shape it did? The early Christians themselves reply: We exist because of Jesus’ resurrection…there is no evidence for a form of early Christianity in which the resurrection was not a central belief. Nor was this belief, as it were, bolted on to Christianity at the edge. It was the central driving force, informing the whole movement.” –N. T. Wright

“I don’t preach Jesus’ story in light of my experience as some sort of helpful symbol or myth that is helpfully illumined by my story. Rather, I am invited by Easter to interpret my story in the light of God’s triumph in the resurrection. Only because we worship a resurrected Lord can we risk preaching.” –William H. Willimon

“We live and die. Christ died and lived!” –John R. W. Stott

“Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of God’s new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven, but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord’s Prayer is about.” ― N.T. Wright

“A dead Christ I must do everything for; a living Christ does everything for me.” ― Andrew Murray

“For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.” –Paul (1 Corinthians 15:3-5)

“The stone was rolled away from the door, not to permit Christ to come out, but to enable the disciples to go in.” –Peter Marshall

“To preach Christianity meant (to the Apostles) primarily to preach the Resurrection…the Resurrection is the central theme in every Christian sermon reported in the Acts. The Resurrection and its consequences were the ‘gospel’ or good news which the Christians brought.” —C.S. Lewis

“According to the laws of legal evidence used in courts of law, there is more evidence for the historical fact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ than for just about any other event in history.” –Dr. Simon Greenleaf

“And now brothers, I will ask you a terrible question, and God knows I ask it also of myself. Is the truth beyond all truths, beyond the stars, just this: that to live without him is the real death, that to die with him the only life?” ― Frederick Buechner

“No book is more fascinating than the Bible. And no books are less fascinating than most of our commentaries on the Bible. Nothing is more formidable and unconquerable than the Church Militant. But nothing is more sleepy and sheepish than the Church Mumbling. Christ’s words roused His enemies to murder and His friends to martyrdom. Our words reassure both sides and send them to sleep. He put the world in a daze. We put it in a doze.” ― Peter Kreeft

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